January 28, 2007

Implicature troubles

Sometimes you can get into trouble by providing Too Much Information,
as this
cartoon shows:

(Hat tip to Dave Borowitz.)

Where things started to go wrong here is where Jade refers to "two
black guys". We'll take her word for it that the guys in question
were black, but why did she mention that? Was it somehow
relevant? Important?

Not everything that's true is relevant (or important) in context.
She could have mentioned their ages, their heights, the country they
grew up in, their sexuality, their marital status, the city they live
in, their relationship to her, or a zillion other things. (Even
mentioning their sex could be problematic; the combination of black and
male might raise a flag in our society.) What if she had said one
of the following?

two guys in their thirties
two guys of average height
two Americans
two straight guys
two single guys
two New Yorkers
two acquaintances from grade school

In each case, her audience would be sent on a hunt to discover what
these properties might have to do with Jade and her Uno game.

The large principle at work here is part of H.P. Grice's account of
"conversational implicature": the principle of RELEVANCE,
that what you say should be relevant to the context, which means that
if people are assuming you're behaving cooperatively, they'll assume
that what you say is indeed relevant to the context. Which means
they'll read more into what you said than what you literally said; what
you said will "implicate" more than its face value.

So the fact that Jade's fellow Uno-players were black (and also male)
looms large. Maybe she's telling us that she's cool, and hangs
out comfortably with black men. Whatever. There's a message
there, even if she didn't intend it. (And nothing gets
fixed at the end; the offered revision is even worse than her original.)

Some years ago, in a discussion of plant theft on a gardening newsgroup
(plant theft is a distressingly common occurrence), one poster reported
that a family of Laotian immigrants had come in the middle of the
night, dug up her whole vegetable garden, and carted it away in their
truck. The poster was astonished at the sharp criticism she got
from other people on the group, who perceived what she wrote as a slur
on Laotian immigrants (or, possibly, Laotians in general or immigrants
in general); but by providing these details about the thieves, right at
the beginning of her account, she made them loom large in the
discourse, overshadowing her intended main point, the monstrous
effrontery of the theft. (By the end of the discussion, I'd
concluded that the "those people" tone of her original posting probably
reflected her attitudes accurately, but that she wasn't consciously
aware of those attitudes.)

This is a place where Strunk's advice to Omit Needless Words is (sort
of) good advice -- except that what you should be omitting is not
really needless specific words, but needless information. And to
do that well, you'll have to gauge your audience and the context pretty
carefully (as well as examining your own intentions). It's not at
all like being careful to omit of
with (certain uses of certain) prepositions -- "Kim walked out the
door" instead of "Kim walked out of the door" -- which is a relatively
mechanical adjustment in the use of very specific words. (Of
course, you might be inclined to just thumb your nose at this
prepositional advice, even though it's in piles of handbooks and is
often "justified" on the basis of ONW.)